Several NHL teams have spent the summer — in the form of high-profile stat department hires — publicly embracing the insane, revolutionary idea that new of forms tracking and interpreting data can help win hockey games.

We've been over that a lot , so there's no need to rehash everything. The most recent and highest-profile example is the Maple Leafs, who hired a stats-informed assistant general manager in Kyle Dubas. He, in turn, brought in two data-driven bloggers (Cam Charron and Rob Pettapiece) and the brains behind the best-yet way to access and interpret advanced stats (Extra Skater's Darryl Metcalf).

That's a major move. It also seems to represent a huge organizational shift; the Maple Leafs, given their public refusal to acknowledge the efficacy of all that stuff, were last season's test case for math — and math won. Let's call it a ninth-round knockout .

So, it was odd to see a tweet from TSN's Darren Dreger saying that Toronto, indeed, used in-house analysts to supply puck-possession data for years. Not much suggests that to be true. Even less suggests that, if they indeed had the data, they used it to any sort of advantage.

This is where we say that counting shot attempts isn't all that hard, and that the Leafs — and any other team for that matter — would be stupid to give away anything that could potentially gain them a tactical edge. Still, the regularity and fervency of their flat-out rejections doesn't back up the idea that they took any of this seriously.

Let's go through some of those, in fact:

General manager Dave Nonis said in November that they chose not to use money budgeted for analytics for "six, seven years," though that seems to leave room for tasking people already on the payroll.

Ex-assistant coach Greg Cronin also said this to Maple Leafs Hot Stove before the season when asked if they track anything that wasn't publicly available: "No, we don’t. We just do a basic thing which is the generation of scoring chances; we know who is generating scoring chances for and who is responsible for a breakdown defensively."

Still, this was Nonis at another conference in March — and remember, he's the GM of a team that reportedly kept track of Corsi/Fenwick data: "The Corsi stat doesn't mean anything. If we have the puck all the time and our goalie can't stop it, we lose the game. So puck possession alone doesn't mean anything."

The bathwater is dirty. Let's throw the baby out with it, too. If a team has the puck all the time and their goalie can't stop shots, that's on the goalie, not the skaters.

Nonis got a little more specific with his example; he was saying, essentially, that having bad goaltenders, as the Leafs did in 2009-10 , invalidates the thought that outshooting the other guys is a positive thing.

"The simple thing about possession (is) you want to have the puck more than the other the team. It doesn't dictate who's gonna win — you go back maybe four years ago, you guys would recall we were outshooting teams regularly," Nonis said. "Some nights we were putting like 50 pucks on the net — and we couldn't win a hockey game."

The team he's talking about featured a 30-goal season from Phil Kessel, and Mikhail Grabovksi, Clarke MacArthur and Nikolai Kulemin on the same, puck-dominant line. At even-strength, that Leafs team controlled 52.9 percent of all shot attempts, which was fourth in the league. It scored 149 even-strength goals, which was ninth in the league.

That's what Corsi and Fenwick measure — and the Leafs were great at it.

They sucked on special teams, though; a 74.6 penalty kill and 14.0 percent power play were both the worst in the league. They also sucked in net; Jonas Gustavsson put up a .902 save percentage in 42 games. Vesa Toskala went .874 in 26 games. Specfically, at even strength, Leafs goalies combined for a .912 save percentage, 25th overall.

It's not tough to understand; that's why they missed the playoffs. A great even-strength team was wasted.

The Leafs didn't seem to understand that, and ascribing any level of importance to shot data would've made it clear. Instead, Leafs fans, knowingly or not, got to watch their team move in the other direction for three more years, hoping that they'd outscore their problems. If you want to catch fish, though, having a bunch of lines in the water helps. There's no real sense in saying otherwise.

And still, there's no other way to put it; NHL teams are free to lie about what they're doing or not doing, but one that uses puck-possession data seriously would not have accepted the Leafs' results over the last four years. Since 2009-10, the Leafs' shot-attempt share at even strength has gone from 47.8 percent to 48.9 to 44.1 to 42.9. This is basic stuff; you don't get there if you're paying attention — and if that's where your "in-house" tracking gets you, you may as well pretend it didn't exist in the first place.

Let's go back to what Nonis said in April: "I wouldn't dismiss all the stats. I wouldn't say analytics are useless. I think there's something out there at some point that will help us, but I haven't seen it yet. I think Corsi and Fenwick, they're just interesting, and that's all they are."

Actually, given who they've hired — four guys who, among other things, can present and interpret Corsi/Fenwick-based data as well as anyone — the Leafs seem to think this is all a little more than "interesting." It'll serve them well moving forward. It just doesn't mean they've felt that way all along.